On November 20th, 2013, I presented a talk at the Penn Humanities Forum on the long arc of visual display. The abstract is as follows: We live in what’s been called the “golden age” of data visualization, and yet, the graphical display of information has a long history, one that dates to the Enlightenment and arguably before. This talk will explore the origins and applications (both historical and contemporary) of data visualization techniques. Drawing from the fields of media history, digital humanities, and information visualization, Lauren Klein will introduce several techniques for…read more

On Wednesday, November 20th, I’ll be speaking at the Penn Humanities Forum about the origins and applications (both historical and contemporary) of data visualization techniques. The official abstract is as follows: We live in what’s been called the “golden age” of data visualization, and yet, the graphical display of information has a long history, one that dates to the Enlightenment and arguably before. This talk will explore the origins and applications (both historical and contemporary) of data visualization techniques. Drawing from the fields of media history, digital humanities, and information visualization, Lauren…read more

I’m pleased to announce that my project with Jacob Eisenstein, Assistant Professor in the School of Interactive Computing, has been awarded a Digital Humanities Startup Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Our project, TOME, which stands for Interactive TOpic Model and MEtadata Visualization, is a tool to support the interactive exploration and visualization of text-based archives. Drawing upon the technique of topic modeling—that is, a computational method for identifying the themes that recur across a collection of texts—our tool will allow humanities scholars to trace the evolution and circulation of these themes…read more

A review essay, in which I comment on the disconnect between American Studies and Digital Humanities (and suggest why this disconnect should not be so), has been published in American Quarterly 46.4. You can download it here.

The slides from my November 7th talk at the University of Alabama’s Digital Humanities Center: Below: A chord diagram of people mentioned in letters concerning James Hemings, as mined from the Papers of Thomas Jefferson Digital Edition.

On Wednesday, November 8th, I’ll be giving a talk at the University of Alabama’s Digital Scholarship Center. I’ll be posting the slides from my talk upon my return, but as a preview, here’s John Melish‘s 1822 “Diagram of the United States.” (The David Rumsey Historical Map Collection has a larger version). I’ll also be leading a brown bag the next day, where I’ll discuss the following projects: Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen’s installation piece, Movable Type. Whitney Trettien’s multimodal essay, Plant->Animal->Book Kate Bagnall and Tim Sherratt’s The Real Face of White Australia Martin Krzywinski’s…read more

I gave two talks in April, both of which have now been archived online. Click here to watch the video of my talk at Georgia Tech’s GVU Center, “Digital Humanities, Data Visualization, and James Hemings.” I gave a related (but distinct) talk at Emory’s Digital Scholarship Commons, “Archival Silence, Digital Humanities, and James Hemings.” You can see an archive of the Tweets here, and a video of the talk here.

What follows is the full text of the paper that I presented at the 2012 MLA, “‘A Report Has Come Here’: Social Network Analysis in the Papers of Thomas Jefferson,” slightly reformatted for the web. The panel, “Networks, Maps, and Words: Digital-Humanities Approaches to the Archive of American Slavery,” also featured talks by Cameron Blevins, of Stanford University, and Aditi Muralidharan, of the University of California, Berkeley, as well as a response from Amy Earhart, of Texas A&M. I convened this panel out of a desire to address the unique set…read more